About

I am an artist and writer, involved in research directed towards aesthetic compulsion, political economy, art as social critique, art education, diagrammatics, and theories of representation.

I studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and completed a PhD on 'The Political Nature of Art Today' at the London Consortium.

Since joining Kingston in 2008, I have co-organised symposia at the Whitechapel Gallery ('Art: What's the Use?', 2011), Tate Modern ('Towards An Avant-Gardist Conception of Gallery Education', 2012) and the ICA ('Plague of Diagrams', 2015 – part of the exhibition of the same name). I have exhibited recent artworks at venues such as BAK (Utrecht), Greene Naftali (NY) and Grundy Art Gallery (Blackpool). I have published essays in Third Text, Visual Culture in Britain, Mute and Art Monthly.

I am currently first supervisor for several practice-based PhD students at the Contemporary Art Research Centre.

Areas of specialism

Contemporary art

Kinetic art

Diagrams

Art and politics

Art education

Thinking through drawing

Marxism

Qualifications

Research

I am interested in pursuing the possibilities for an art of social expression, cognitive exploration and enjoyment. Sometimes in my work, e.g. kinetic sculptures and certain videos, this is manifested through a compulsive, 'idiotically' repetitive, horror aesthetic. At other times, as with certain diagrams, live drawings and digital collages, the work operates with respect to specific issues, texts or problems (economic, political, philosophical, etc.). Influenced both by semiotic and allegorical methods of symbolic production, I am interested in creating affective forms of representation. These processes have extended into methods of teaching, as with my development of Social Body Mind Mapping and other forms of 'thinking through drawing'. Recently, I have written about art education, seeking to defend the principles of social inclusion, critical thinking and experimentation whilst drawing attention to the political contradictions of 'professional practice'. This is part of a wider political critique of the art world.